How Sympathy is a Trap [Season 1 Ep 3] – Full Transcript

00:00:40 Hello and welcome to Master Coach Mindset™, my name is Rhonda Britten and I get to be your host and Master Coach for this episode. I am so excited because my job is to support you in going from being a hesitant coach to being a confident coach to being a good coach to being a great coach.

00:00:27 Whether you’re a therapist, a nutritionist, a life coach, a business coach, a human resource director, a team manager, you are coaching. Any time that you’re interacting with another human being, asking them to move forward in some area of “your life and/or the business” coaching skills are necessary. I’m knowing that right here and right now today’s episode is really going to support you greatly in building more heart into your business as well as giving your heart to more clients.

00:01:36 Today’s episode is part three of a 13 part series based on my Master Coach Manifesto™. You can go to episode zero to listen to the entire Master Coach Manifesto™, or go to MasterCoachMindset.com to download the manifesto yourself. Over the next 13 episodes we’re just taking, breaking apart the Master Coach Manifesto™ piece by piece by piece so we can really dive into what the heck does this mean?

00:02:03 I’m knowing that if you haven’t already listened to episode one or listened to episode two, please do that now. Of course make sure you go to listen to episode zero to hear the entire Master Coach Manifesto™.

00:02:15 Again, today is episode three, and why I share the Master Coach Manifesto™ is it’s critical that you remind yourself that you have something to aim for, that you have a grounding tool in your toolbox so you can remind yourself what is a Master Coach. If you’d like and if it supports you to use my Master Coach Manifesto™, please do, and again download it at MasterCoachMindset.com. I will get it right.

00:02:49 This is what a Master Coach does, it doesn’t matter if you err or make a mistake, flub, whatever because that’s just life. I’ll never forget the first time that I started thinking about becoming a public speaker. I first started private coaching one on one, and then I started doing groups, and I’ll tell you the full story someday.

00:03:13 Then I started speaking, and I thought being a speaker was being perfect and like a robot and like look at my drawing, look at my pretty things. Here, one, two, three, come on! Please don’t ask me ever, say yes! Please don’t do that. I’m going to slap you silly if you say that to me, all right?

00:03:37 Knowing and learning and recognizing that to flub and to make mistakes is actually part of being a great speaker, it’s also part of being a great coach, let my fears subside and now my job is to be fully, authentically me. Here I am, Rhonda Britten, live.

00:04:03 Again, today’s episode is part three of a 13 part series of the Master Coach Manifesto™, and I’m here to support you in having confidence, impact, and influence in your own life and with your clients. I want you to go from a beginning coach to a good coach, good coach to a great coach, great coach to a Master Coach. Let’s get to part three of the manifesto. If you’re in a place to shut your eyes, and of course if you’re driving don’t do it. If you can shut your eyes just to listen to this, that would be awesome sauce.

00:04:32 A Master Coach never blames or shames their client, or gives them sympathy or pity, but supports them unconditionally. Let’s read that again. Shut those eyes and just listen if you can. A Master Coach never blames or shames their client. No eye rolling, no why’d you do that for? No, are you sure you want to do that? Is that really in line with where you want to go? Is that part of your plan?

00:05:04 All of that tone, oh Jesus lord almighty, shame, shame, shame. Or as a Master Coach you do not give them sympathy or pity. No, you don’t say, “Aww, that sounds horrible. Aww, well let me help you. Aww.” No, you don’t do that either. A Master Coach does support them unconditionally, and like I referenced in episode two, supporting them unconditionally does not mean 24/7, does not mean no boundaries. It actually means you support them unconditionally in a way that works for you.

00:05:42 We’ll talk a little bit more on that in a minute, but first I want to tell you a story of my client Betsy. Betsy is actually now in the Life Coach Certification Program™ here at the Fearless Living Institute™, our coach-training program, and she is now a program candidate. She was having one of her first clients.

00:06:06 By the way, Betsy studied at another well known coaching school for a year in a year program. Realized that she didn’t have the skills or the tools to actually have the confidence to coach, and so she came to our program, the Life Coach Certification Program™, to get additional training. Because we do things that nobody else does, when one of those things is 12 month mentoring. You actually have somebody paying attention and listening to and giving you individualized, customized feedback on your sessions.

00:06:33 In one of these sessions that one of our professional mentors had with Betsy, Betsy’s client said he lost his job. Losing your job seems like a really bad thing, doesn’t it? Betsy immediately went, “Oh, I’m so sorry.” One of our mentors, Sherri Peterson, one of our certified Fearless Living® coaches and Master Coaches, she goes, “Whoa, wait a minute.” They talked about the disempowerment and the assumption that she was making based on her desire to give sympathy, IE “Oh I’m so sorry.”

00:07:21 Now I’m not talking about passings, death, grieving. We’re going to put that aside. This example is about losing a job. Sherri brought up another program candidate in our Life Coach Certification Program™. While Danny was going through it he was fired from his job, and he had wanted to be a coach full-time, but he had this other job, which of course that’s awesome.

00:07:48 You’re working full-time as you go through the program, that’s fine and dandy, most people do. Danny got fired, cutbacks in the business. Danny, his coach, his mentor did not say, “Oh I’m sorry.” Instead, his coach said, “How do you feel about that?” Danny said, “Awesome! Excited! This is exactly the thing that I needed to get myself out to do coaching full-time!”

00:08:17 Now it doesn’t mean that Danny didn’t have a moment of like, “What?” Ultimately Danny knew that this was a positive, impactful, powerful thing that just had happened. It was the universe giving him a little kick, right? Where Betsy, while she was going through the LCCP, Life Coach Certification Program™, she wasn’t at that point yet even though she’d gone through a yearlong training program of a famous coaching school. She hadn’t learned this.

00:08:45 When she realized that giving sympathy doesn’t allow the client to have their own experience and actually puts your experience onto them, how you feel onto them, she got it. She got that her job is not to feel sorry for the client, or to feel bad for the client, or to be like, “Aww,” for the client, or to give pity to the client, or think the client in any way is in a bad way, is in bad shape. To even think those thoughts about your client disempowers your client.

00:09:21 Betsy learned that her personal opinion about what it would feel like to lose a job is irrelevant. Instead, you want your client to have full permission to say and feel and think or do whatever they need to do. Betsy has a client say, “I lost my job.” Now she knows to say, “Oh I’m so sorry.” Don’t need that, not helpful. Instead saying, “How do you feel about that?”

00:10:00 Getting their feelings, and again that’s asking a client how they feel is training in and of itself. Most people don’t actually know how they feel. They’ll usually give you an answer like, “Okay,” or, “Bummed,” or, “Pissed off,” or they’ll say something. Pissed off is closer to a feeling, but most people blow off their feelings and they’ll say, “No, I’m good, I’m all right. I know it’s going to be okay.”

00:10:27 They start rationalizing, using their brain to make excuses for what just happened. We’re trying to give our life meaning, which having meaning is not a bad thing, but we’re trying to put it in perspective and make it okay. When in fact it might not be okay. It might be really devastating. It might be really sad. It might bring up all their fears.

00:10:50 We want to create a place for our clients to have any feeling and have any feeling be okay. That they don’t have to have the nice feeling, they don’t have to have the perfect feeling, they don’t have to have the evolved feeling, they don’t have to have the empowered feeling. They just feel.

00:11:05 Again, most of your clients don’t even know what they feel. One of the things that you have to do is just have them start identifying how they feel. Your question, regardless of whatever’s happening in their life, “Oh I lost a job.” “Oh I gained a girlfriend.” Is not also, “Yay,” it’s also, “How does that feel?” Again, you’re not going to place your feelings onto them. You’re in fact going to evoke, request, ask what their feelings are.

00:11:37 Then you’re going to say things like, “Tell me what you want to do now,” or, “Tell me what you think about that,” or, “Tell me what your next step is,” or, “Tell me what that brings up for you,” or, “Tell me how that’s different than before.” You’re going to ask a series of layered questions to help that experience become fully used up, get the juice out of that experience.

00:12:01 A way to help your clients with their feelings is to do the following, and this is going to be part of your Fearbuster Exercise™ today in this week’s episode. You’re going to want to go to MasterCoachMindset.com to download your Fearbuster Exercise™ worksheet as well as the transcript of this episode.

00:12:23 One of the things that I want you to do is actually start supporting, educating, guiding your clients into actually discovering how they feel. If they say, “Tired,” you go, “That’s a body sensation, not a feeling. Sorry.” “Fine.” “Fine doesn’t, no, don’t get to. Fine isn’t enough, that doesn’t count.” “I feel okay.” “No, that’s not a feeling.”

00:12:45 If they feel stressed, ooh, coaching tip of the day. If there was one word I’d love to get rid of in our English language it is the word stress. Because I believe that when you or your client use the word stress to describe what’s going on inside of you and around you and in your life, you’re actually not talking about what’s really going on which is what you’re feeling.

00:13:41 In your Fearbuster Exercise™ today I’m going to give you something called a feelings list, and your job is to give that to your client when you first start working with them. In the first, second, third session you’re going to give them this feelings sheet once you start talking about feelings.

00:13:58 You’re going to give this sheet to them, and when you say, “What feeling’s coming up for you right now? How are you feeling right now? Which feeling is bubbling up?” Instead of accepting, “Okay, fine, whatever, great, I don’t know, stressed,” you’re going to say, “Go ahead and look at your feelings list and guess what you’re feeling.”

00:14:22 This is a really powerful tool as a Master Coach. Actually, once your client starts guessing what they’re feeling, they’re actually going to become more accurate in how they feel. Your job as a coach is just to start them guessing in the beginning, just guess. Go ahead and read the feelings list, and pick one that’s the closest thing that you can think of. Just pick one.

00:14:51 When they start picking what they feel, it’ll actually start cementing the feelings inside of them in their body, what’s going on in their head, and what they’re moving through all becomes crystal clear. They start understanding the difference between a feeling of frustration versus a feeling of rage versus a feeling of anger. Those are very different feelings.

00:15:09 You as the Master Coach, one of the greatest gifts you can give to your client is the subtlety of feelings. To have them become an expert in their body sensations, in their mind, because again everybody receives feelings differently. Some people feel it in their bodies, some people have thoughts about feelings. Some people actually feel it in a different, like feel their heart some places, feel their stomach certain things.

00:15:35 We have different ways that they show up for us, but we need a vocabulary in order to articulate it to the people around us so that we have an understanding, so we don’t become blank unto ourselves, so we don’t become an enigma, that we don’t become invisible to ourselves. That we actually know what we feel.

00:15:52 Knowing what we feel is empowering and powerful, and as a Master Coach it’s one of your main responsibilities. Especially in the beginning of that client-coach relationship, is to support that client in understanding how they feel. Not accepting the first thing that they say, because most likely that may or may not be true.

00:16:10 Now, I love Nonviolent Communication. If you haven’t read that book I encourage you to, but I differ about one thing about Nonviolent Communication. Nonviolent Communication says that you should guess the person’s feeling, IE, “It sounds like you’re frustrated today, Sam.” We don’t do that in Fearless Living®. What I invite you to do instead is actually give the client always three feelings.

00:16:35 If they’re like, “I don’t know how I feel, I don’t know how I feel. I don’t know.” Then you as the coach can say, “Well, do you feel sad? Frustrated? Happy?” In Fearless Living® we give a minimum of three feelings, and they’re different feelings. They’re not all sad, frustrated, angry. No, they’re sad, frustrated, happy.

00:16:56 They’re three very different feelings, giving your client full permission to feel whatever they feel. Because again in our presence our client gets to feel anything that they need to feel. We are that safe place, we are that safe haven.

00:17:11 No sympathy or pity, that just identifies your judgments, identifies what you think is right or wrong. No blame or shame, because again that identifies your judgments, that identifies what you think is or isn’t okay. Look, your client is coming to you to not feel blame and shame, so your job is to become an expert at never blaming and shaming.

00:17:39 That’s going to come through your tone, blame, and shame, and sympathy, and pity come through your tone of voice and through the words that you use. If you’re in one on one with a client, they can physically see you, you’re on maybe Skype or Zoom or some other technology, then you just rolling your eyes or ugh or any sort of movement may trigger them to imply blame or shame.

00:18:05 Remember, your client is coming to you with a host of history that includes a lot of blame and shame. Your job is to allow this place to be sacred, this place to be privileged, so there is no blame and shame. There is no false cheerleading either, by the way. There’s no like, “Great! Great! Great!” None of that either. Don’t do it. Don’t you do it. No “great”. Now again, great authentically yes, but we’re not here to cheerlead from a fake place. We’re here to actually give them skills that’s anchored.

00:18:43 Today I want you to focus on feelings with your client, and the second part of this is support them unconditionally. Well, supporting them unconditionally means that you’re always having their intention at heart. You’re always focusing on their success definitely. You’re always asking them to be more of their authentic self. You are there to hold them up, to help them see, to be that mirror, to be that place that’s safe, healing, that they can discover parts of themselves, they can judge parts of themselves.

00:19:15 Another question I was asked is if a client goes off on a rant and starts to get defensive, what do you suggest doing? Do you suggest acknowledging it, ignoring it? How do we not get into our client’s stuff? Well, when you’re supporting them unconditionally, you’re like a wise grandma. You’re like a wise monk, you’re like the Buddha. They can be doing whatever they’re doing. Getting defensive, anger, acting out.

00:19:52 First of all, the minute they get defensive, I would listen to that session afterwards to make sure your tone didn’t evoke that. Again, not that you made them get defensive, but what in you allowed that to come forth? Again, I’m not saying that you did it, I’m just asking was there something, some tone, something you worded that supported their willingness to get triggered? Their willingness to get defensive.

00:20:22 While we’re going through this Master Coach podcast, I really invite you to tape your sessions with your clients so that you can start discovering how to get better, how to be better. Go from good to great, great to masterful. Okay?

00:20:37 What do you do when your client rants, starts to get defensive? You love them. You just let them go. Then you say, “Tell me about that. What just happened? What moved through you? What’s going on?” You don’t say, “What’s going on?” Or, “Hey, don’t talk to me that way,” or, “Who do you think you are?” Or, “Hey, you know what? You’re not going to change if you keep getting defensive.” You’re not going to say any of those things.

00:21:09 You’re literally going to be a safe place, and then say, “Hey, what’s going on? What just moved through you? What are you thinking right now? What are you feeling right now? Is this how you want to show up? Is there anything more you want to get out? I say go for it, just vent away. Vent, vent, vent away. Vent away.”

00:21:38 Our job is a sacred job, and it’s to love our clients, hold their hand, hold them up until they can do it for themselves. It doesn’t mean you’re available 24/7, it doesn’t mean you give them your cell phone number and they get to call you. Now some coaches do have a 24/7 process they package, and that’s your choice.

00:22:14 I invite you not to do that based on self care and wanting to make sure that you’re cared for. Again, you may be that type of coach, and I say go for it. I definitely know coaches that make $100,000 and they’re 24/7 on call for one year. Awesome, that is not me. I do not want to be on call. Again, that’s yours to decide.

00:22:35 Just because a client needs you doesn’t mean you have to be available. Instead it’s about supporting them unconditionally and not necessarily having to say anything or do anything or fix anything. Because again, coaches don’t fix. It’s just about standing for them. Most clients can get from week one to week two, week two to week three. They don’t need to talk to you in between those sessions. Some people are supported through text, some people are supported with shorter sessions more frequently. Again, that’s up to you to decide. You can try anything, this is your business, this is your practice, this is your life.

00:23:17 Today’s topic, a Master Coach never blames or shames their client, or gives them sympathy or pity, but supports them unconditionally. Go over to MasterCoachMindset.com to download your Fearbuster Exercise™ today as well as the transcript of this episode. I invite you to get a three ring binder and start collecting these exercises as well as these transcripts, so that you are literally creating a big, giant book for yourself of learnings.

00:23:57 Then I invite you to read the transcript over again and underline what you personally want to work on, where you could become better and of course ask yourself the famous coach question, on a scale of one to ten. On a scale of one to ten how well are you doing this? On a scale of one to ten how much have you embodied this? On a scale of one to ten how aligned are you with this? On a scale of one to ten, it’s an important tool to use. Make sure you got that one-ten down.

00:24:21 Next episode we’re going to be talking about the fourth part of our 13 part series, which is the fourth line of the Master Coach Manifesto™, which is the following: A Master Coach likes actions and accomplishments, but loves the process and always stands for grounded possibilities.

00:24:41 In episode four we’re going to be talking about, yes actions and accomplishments are nice, but process, that’s where it all happens. Always stand for grounded possibilities. I bet you’re asking yourself right now, “What does that mean?” Well, we’re going to talk about it in episode four.

00:24:57 Again, go over to MasterCoachMindset.com, download your Fearbuster Exercise™ worksheet as well as download the transcript of this call. Grab a three ring binder and start throwing them in there, and start underlining, and make sure you do each week’s Fearbuster Exercise™. Each episode’s Fearbuster Exercise™ is designed to support you in embodying the topic of the day, the principal of the day.

00:25:20 Are you ready to really own being a Master Coach at a more deep level? Then I am so excited to be moving through this with you, so I want to say I get to see you in episode four. Good work, be fearless.

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Rhonda Britten- Master Coach Mindset

June 22, 2018 by Kellyv@CoachForward from United States

I recommend everyone who is interested in upleveling their coaching and communication skills get on board with this podcast! I can listen to an episode several times and continue to find new awarenesses and ways to improve how I coach! At her core, Rhonda truly cares about her audience and how we can continue to honor each other in our thoughts, words and actions with clarity, gentleness and true kindness. If you are serious about coaching, this series is a must-have for your podcast learning library.

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I’ve been Coaching for 3+ years, though with lots of life changes in this past year, my skills have become dull + dusty. I definitely needed a refresher + was thrilled to hear in Episode 1 a few simple tips to do just that ... things I know + have forgotten + things I’ve never heard another Trainer or Coaching School teach. Rhonda is the real deal. If you’re looking to cut to the chase with your Coaching + your clients, subscribe, listen + learn from the very best in the business.

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This is gold for all coaches, no matter where you received training! As one of Rhonda’s CFLCs, I love the review and freshening up of my coaching skills. This is a must listen for anyone calling themselves a coach because if you aren’t doing this for yourself and your clients, you need to be. This is a great starting point and I know it will inspire many to apply for training from Rhonda and the Fearless Living Institute. This work changed my life and I use it every single day personally and with my clients.

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Just as a caveat, I am a self-admitted Rhonda junkie. The reason for that is because she’s the real deal. The information she provides has substance and value. Her work changes lives (I am living proof and one of thousands of lives she’s improved). If you want to become a better coach, or even just a better person, and learn practical tools and tips, I highly recommend this podcast.

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I just finished Episode 3, and I want more! This podcast dives deep into the art of coaching and is delivered with the heart and humor that keeps it compelling and fun. I’ve been coaching for more than a decade, and I come away from each episode with new ideas for my clients. Keep them coming, Rhonda!

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Get immediate access to our Fearbuster Coaching Toolkit, includes your very own copy of the Master Coach Manifesto to hang on your wall and "How to Open A Session" and "How to Close A Session" Step-by-Step Templates plus, accompanying Bonus Training Videos that show you how to create forever clients.

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